The hand is the most basic symbol of personal identity throughout history; for kid's drawings, and for the artist: our basic tool for mark-making. My right hand is the most precious part of my body, yet it is disabled...I can trace it like a child...hence the series of my hand. The hand drawings are about my own... Read More

The hand is the most basic symbol of personal identity throughout history; for kid's drawings, and for the artist: our basic tool for mark-making. My right hand is the most precious part of my body, yet it is disabled...I can trace it like a child...hence the series of my hand. The hand drawings are about my own identity...the pain of working it...and of tatoos.
I can't have an apprentice, like Raphael or the great Masters...so I  invested in another hand, my computer.

My fondest reading...(from Bertholt Brecht)

But you, I beg you
Check your wrath and scorn
For man needs help
From every creature born

I wake every morning to consider the complexity of cultures. My art expresses my concerns about cultural pattern, human fragility and sense of place. I believe we are all individuals that create society and its culture...patterns...marks; we are flesh...and fragile...we all bleed.

My paintings are an attempt to talk about the inroads of of white technology into the Australian landscape, cutting across Aboriginal culture and legends. In my 'As the Serpent Struggles' series, I use the symbols of the car, the snake, the tyre-tread scar, with suggestions of an Aboriginal approachto painting without co-opting of style. I use varous systems of representation to talk about the juxtaposition of black and white cultures.
The snake, feared by white culture, represents the Great Rainbow Serpent, creator of life and landforms in the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories.
The car, the truck, has been the vehicle for removal of many Aboriginals from their ancestral lands; depositing them hundreds of miles away...so it has also become the only way to return.
The desert landscape is hostile to us and we view it from the artificial boundaries of cars.

I was told of a woman who was out of her camp when white men arrived in trucks, and removed all the families to another site. When she came back she found only the tyre-tread marks and wept because she thought that the rainbow serpent had taken all her kin.

Based in Prospect, Adelaide, Ann Newmarch is a nationally acclaimed, senior artist, with over 20 solo exhibitions and 100 group shows.
Her work is represented in many major national and international collections.
Ann worked as an art lecturer for 32 years at the South Australian School of Art. She is widely acknowledged for her contribution to art education, experimental printmaking and the Australian Community Art movement.
She is the recipient of numerous awards and in 1998 was awarded the Order of Australia for services to art.
A longstanding feminist and social activist, Newmarch has worked around themes drawn from her own personal experiences as well as social issues and work on community and collaborative projects. Her work is wide ranging and she doesn't hold to a prescriptive 'signature' style.